All You Need to Do Is 5 Percent

[In India last year, Hang Mai shared this poignant 3-minute insight from her permaculture farming experience.]

Below is the transcript of her full talk, followed by the video:

Thank you. What a pleasure to speak after Nipun and Preeta for a farmer intern like me. My name is Hang Mai and I studied law in university. After that, I worked for a corporation for 10 years, and then I have 10 years as a social entrepreneur and I'm going to celebrate my 10 years in Permaculture next February. You mentioned about revolutions (citing Preeta’s previous presentation). So, when in 2010, the first time I heard about The One-Straw Revolution, I was busy making compost with the farmers in the rice field in the Mekong Deltas of Vietnam and letting them burn the rice field after harvest. When one of my friends, who is also Indian--he was my colleague before-- said, "Oh, you are in organic farming. You have to read this man." So, he sent me a PDF. And when I read that I said, "Wow, I'm doing it all wrong." [Fukuoka] doesn't make any compost. And to him burning the field is something really violent because just with one pinch of ash, you can dissolve a spider net, you know?

So, I had new ideas about what is the revolution, because being born Vietnamese, I belong to the baby boomer generation after the war. I was born in scarcity because we had to queue up for everything, even for food and water and everything. And as you see, I bet that those designers didn't read Fukuoka before they designed the book. That's why the revolution symbol is the fist and flag. But in fact, the Fukuoka revolution is this [one strand of straw], and he said, "From this one straw, a revolution could begin." And I was interested, but I had no idea how it works.

I met Nipun the same time when we published this book in Vietnamese, in February 2015. And I met him in Berlin, and he was so excited he came to tell me that, "Oh, you are publishing Fukuoka book, we are practicing this in ServiceSpace," and he talked about gift economy. Okay, gift economy -- I intuitively believe that is something right. But then I didn't see any connection between that thing and this [one straw revolution]. You know? And when we were in Bhutan again, [Nipun] called everyone into a room, and we sat, and he said that we are doing an Awakin circle or something. I still didn't see any link between this and the circle. And when we went to Costa Rica, he dragged everyone to a cafe and said, "Hey, we're going to do a small act of kindness. We are going to pay for people at the next table." Yes, nice. But what's the link? You know? So, then I read, I gaze in the website [and] all the things that they gave me, and then I followed the laddership, but still didn't see the link.

[Fukuoka said that "Gradually, I came to realize that the process of saving the desert of the human heart and revegetating the actual desert is actually the same thing." --Masanobu Fukuoka, Sowing the Seeds in the Desert]

And it is so similar to Gandhi's spirit. And he himself, when he came to India - he loved India. He came here very often, and he said that if Gandhi were a farmer, Gandhi would do exactly the way he did in his farm. Still, I did not see any link.

Only when I walked the path, you know, then I saw the link.

This is the 5/95 principle that I've learned from nature. We all know about the 20/80, right? But mother nature is drop-dead generous. So that is the thing. Google says it is the soil composition. You'll find that on Google. And I see that many times during our training to the farmers. But one day, suddenly everything was clear to me. So, you see, this is the best soil composition we can find in nature, in the middle of the virgin forest of which the component of 45% are minerals, which is natural. It comes from the weathered rock, mother rock, all minerals will come from the rock. So, this decides which kinds of plants will grow here but not there. And there is about 25 to 30% humidity inside of the soil and the same ratio for the air. Only 5% for organic matter. So that's the best. Human beings cannot reach this kind of composition. Only in the middle of the forest, the virgin forest, can we find it. And only the 5%, that 5% changes everything. And at that moment, I understood what Fukuoka talked about, 'the one straw can start a revolution' and one small act of kindness can change the world, because at first it is so small, we can easily miss it. We will target the 95%. We love a big bite.

And even if we don't miss the 5%, seeing from outside it looks like we do nothing. That's why they call Fukuoka natural farming "do-nothing" farming, but it's not doing nothing. It's do-the-right-thing, the right part. And I also think that mother nature doesn't want us to be so busy. We are the busiest species on earth, even more than the bees. However, bees sleep, you know, we don't. So, they don't want us to be so busy. They just want us to do 5% for the outer world. Maybe the rest is for our inner world, we forget.

When I read that 5%, I think, well, 5% is easy, easy because, in our farm, there is an abundance of biomass; 5% is easy. But it's not. It is a simple thing, small thing, but you have to do it daily, constantly, because all of that will be continuously regenerated, dissolved, and become the soil. And if there's only one thing we can do for the outer world, it is the biomass. A small act of kindness. That's where I make the link.

So, the next question is very important because the biomass is important. And if you need it daily, constantly, the best is "what grows here". You know, what is local? If you transport biomass 20 kilometers. So, it is minus in terms of energy, it is minus.

This a lesson from one of the gang [a farmer in our community]. He said, "In the first two years, I thought I could do better than nature. The next two years, I thought I could do as well as nature. But after six years, I know nature absolutely prevails." He was busy, he knows that biomass is important, but he transported biomass all over the area to his place to get more and more biomass, instead of what grows here and let it grow. And this process for him is greening from inside out and outside in. As a result, here's the land that he accessed in May 2018. Yeah, it's nothing. Even the lake is really acidic, the water. It's a bare hill. And after six years, 90% are regenerated. The trees grow by themselves. And that's the lake.

So, this took him six years to learn.

See this is Acacia Plantation. And in my country now all over the country there is Acacia. It's about 3.5 million hectares, only Acacia. And this man, they have another way to do things. So, he lets everything that can grow under the shade of Acacia, he lets it grow. And after five years, once he harvests the Acacia and it becomes like this. Can any of you guess how long it took after harvesting here? Just guess. No wrong. No right. Just guess.

Six months.

Yeah. That's why it is a rainforest. It is rainforest. Yes, I agree. But we just need to find our 5%. And why that 5%? Why the biomass and why the small act of kindness is important, although it's small, because it ignites the infinite game. It prepares the soil, it fuels the wheel.

This is the wheel.

I call it the wheel of life [the food chain of producers, consumers, and decomposers]. We study this in the sixth grade, the first years of secondary school in Vietnam. But then no one will remember that until I walked my path and then I saw that, “Wow, this is something important.” And we really underestimate that. And this gives us another lens for the 'we'. So, the 'we' is not limited to this cluster of consumers. The consumers include humanity and other animals: herbivores, carnivores, omnivores; they are all here, the consumers. We can connect among humanity, and we can connect with other animals. However, we need to connect to other forces of nature, which are producers and decomposers. These two forces keep the wheel running; let the wheel roll.

In terms of producing energy, Fukuoka said that we produce nothing. The more we produce, the more the earth’s energies are eaten up. In the nineties of last century, he said that to produce one unit of food, we need two units of energy. So, we are an octopus that is congratulating ourselves for being fat by eating our own leg.

The producer, the only fellow in this world that can be called producers, are those who have photosynthesis ability. We don't have that. And they are our savings and our saviors, because even the fossil energy we are using now comes from them, million years ago. So, they are the one, and they have the power to transform everything that is invisible to be visible. They have a miracle.

And these guys [decomposers] transform everything that is visible to become invisible. And that's why that wheel rolls. So, keep the wheel rolling instead of putting the stick into the wheel.

[Fukuoka] said, "Serve God by restoring nature."

That's what we learned from nature and how we translated that into our movement.

This is what grows here.

Initially, when we published the book, we targeted the farmers. But after two years, none of the farmers were interested in the book. Instead, they were all city people like us who are college graduates, with a good job in the city, and wanting to go back [to the land]. But we didn't know how to go back and once [the book] reached 10,000 readers, I thought that I have to do something with the ServiceSpace design principle, because I don't know what to do with them, really.

In our first gathering, co-organized with my sister, Giang, only 26 people came. And after that, until now, only five among them are farmers, including my husband and I. However, we trust the nature's design principle. Right now, every two hours, when you drive by car, you can reach a family or a group of families, that are practicing this way of farming.

So how this happened with all the things that Nipun talked about, the multiple forms of capital that I have seen in this movement. Even the book translation is by volunteers, everything is by volunteers. I just have an idea that, "Hey, I think we need to translate this book," and all the resources come. They are all the best in their expertise, you know, experts in that. And they came and even a famous emcee knocked my door to say that, "Hey, the book is good. I would like to make an audio version for that because I'm in a mid-life crisis. I want to do something useful." So, we have all that kind of people come, and make it happen, and everything we do is, we just hold the space.

And we start with our own act of kindness, which means that we come to share the design principles of the farm with everyone. So that I can link it to what Nipun talked about as the narrow margin game to the broad margin game and to the infinite margin game. So, it's the same principle when we design a farm.

Everyone will ask, "What [area of the land] can I save it for? How many percent of the [land's] surface should I keep for the short-term crops, middle term crops, and long-term crops?"

It depends on your needs. If your short-term needs are just as small as the [ratio of my phone compared to the mat shown on picture], then keep that space for the short term. You save the surrounding space [on the mat] for the long term, for the infinite game. And as a result, after 10 years, now, once our people see why the infinite game is important, automatically they reduce the size of their short-term crops, and they save the land for the forest. And, suddenly, the farming movement becomes a forest restoration movement now. And it was an emergence. We didn't expect that. And one day I found myself discussing with the government people to do things like advocacy and lobby for the forestry policy, you know, so that is all emergence. But once we know that's important, we shift from the short-term crops farmers to be forest guardians.

This man guarded his forest for 20 years, and it's a hundred percent regenerated. That's it. And I would like to end with a Fukuoka invitation. Can you give one minute? I would like to invite my friend Charles to share this invitation with you.

Rev. Charles: This is the kind of heart pin you never lose with. When we met, and Hang Mai was talking about this, and she said, "Oh, I would love you to read this last slide, but I don't know about your religion." And I said to her, "You are my religion. You are my religion. Wherever the human heart opens in service is my religion. And I'd love to share this:

"For God is nature and nature is God. The only way is for people to return to our proper position within nature as one member among all living things. Then we can recover our soul and resurrect the green.

"In these increasingly chaotic modern times, we must show the will to walk the other way, to serve God by restoring nature, to turn it into a green paradise again. Then, people will become aware of the true wellspring of human joy, the true wellspring of human joy. And they, too, will turn around and strive for peace and happiness.”  (Quote by Masanobu Fukuoka)

Thank You. Thank you for the peace and happiness movement.